Monday, 7 January 2019

In my recent post on “The myth of a Vatican porn collection” (here), I mentioned the popular conflation of the Vatican’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum—the bibliography (published by the Vatican) of books that Catholics were prohibited from owning or reading—with the collection that the Vatican itself held.

Over Christmas break, I read an excellent essay on “Prohibited Books in the Clergy Library at Ovada” by Father Ivan Page (a lovely man, and a long-time member of the Centre for the Book at Monash, who died in 2012; see here for his obituary). Ivan’s essay contains fascinating new information about prohibited books that are (or once were) in the Vatican’s collections, by someone who knew the collection well. The essay helps explain how the myth of a Vatican porn collection may have arisen.

Ivan’s essay is based on a paper presented at the State Library of Victoria in July 2010, but has only just been published in a small collection of essays (Censorship in the Ancien Régime), in a limited edition, by the Ancora Press. Since this essay is unlikely to have the scholarly reach that this subject deserves I thought I’d mention it here. It is possible that others have previously reported on Ivan’s findings. If so, it is news to me!

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The parts of Ivan’s essay that are of particular interest are pp.25–26 (concerning the fate of the Vatican’s banned books, which I will discuss today) and 39–42 (concerning licenses, which I will discuss on another occasion). Ivan conducted his research at the Vatican Library to discover why certain works had been put on the Index; consequently, he consulted the “Archives of the Congregation of the Index, which, since the Congregation no longer exists, are held with those of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith” (24–25). Since “it has only been possible for scholars to consult these archives since 1998 … the experience is still relatively rare” (25).

(I’d suggest that the experience is more than just rare, it would be a bibliophilic and bibliographic heaven! The records that Ivan had gone in search of are contained in “thick volumes of manuscript reports, mostly written in Latin, each one covering the Congregation’s activities for one or more years” (25). What an evocative description. Below is a reminder of what the Vatican library archives look like!)

Based on this 2005 article by Thomas Heneghan, which reviews the research undertaken by the Rev. Hubert Wolf**), Wikipedia explains (here), the administrative process of evaluating a work: the Congregation of the Index held meetings several times a year; works that were to be discussed at the meetings were thoroughly examined—two people scrutinizing each work. (Prohibitions made by other congregations, mostly the Holy Office, were passed on to the Congregation of the Index.)

At their meetings, the Congregation collectively decided whether to advise that the works should be included in the Index. Documentation from these meetings was passed on to the Pope, to aid him in making his decision. After the Pope decided whether to approve these works being added or removed from the Index, final decrees against the individual works were drafted by the Congregation and made public.

According to Ivan, “Where the work [being scrutinized by the Congregation was] a pamphlet, one sometimes finds it bound up with the report. According to the inventory,” however, “all the books referred to the Congregation were at one time shelved in the Secretary’s office. There came a time when they were too numerous for the space available. With the approval of the Pope, they were transferred to the Biblioteca Casanatense, one of the Dominican libraries in Rome. No instructions were given, such as requiring them to be kept together. The library took some of the books into its collection—and discarded the rest” (25).

Unfortunately, Ivan did not provide any references for this paragraph; his sudden death probably prevented him from fully referencing his essay as a whole. The claim, however, is clear: that the reports compiled by the Congregation of the Index were based on a close examination of the work concerned—something that required access to the book itself. As Ivan writes: while the decree “never gives the reason for the decision … the censor’s report analyses the work examined in some detail; it often quotes a selection of passages … and reminds the reader of the Church’s own teaching on the subject” (25).

It is clear, then, that the Congregation library did, at one time, contain copies of all of the works which it reported on—whether or not the work was ultimately added to the Index (and many were not added). That some pamphlets remain in the Congregation library, but that the bulk of them were—at some point—transferred to the Biblioteca Casanatense, which kept an unknown percentage of them.

It would be interesting to examine the Casanatense collection, to see whether it is possible to establish just how many of the works examined by the censor’s at the Congregation of the Index, survive. That is, what proportion of the Vatican’s enfer resides at Via di Sant'Ignazio, 52.

I have been inspired by David Levy’s “Year in Collecting” posts (here, here and here) to write something about the Eliza Haywood books I have managed to buy in the last couple of years.

I don’t usually say much about my purchases so soon after making them because, in many cases, I have only been able to buy a Haywood item cheaply because the person selling it is not aware of the Haywood connection. By publishing some of the details of these purchases here, I probably reduce the chances of being lucky again. I.e., I have a strong motivation to stay silent.

However, in this last few years, I seem to be buying fewer and fewer books anyway, and more of the ones I am buying are from established dealers. So, although I had a little bit of good fortune on eBay, for the most part—when something did come up—I was like the hero of this cartoon strip by Sarah Andersen—Boom!

What stands out, numerically, amongst the two dozen Haywood items I have bought over the last two years, are the seven copies of The Female Spectator, five copies of La Belle Assemblée and three copies of the elusive nineteenth-century reprints of—excuse this circumlocution—the English translation of the French translation of The Fortunate Foundlings (which I will avoid naming for now!). Interesting as these are, I will discuss them last, because the real highlights for me were among the other items.

But the two Haywood items I was most excited to find were a 1735 edition of A Wife to be Lett—a very early work by Haywood and the only play of hers I have seen in an original edition—and a first edition (albeit in a mixed set) of The History of Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy, one of her major novels and, consequently, a work I never expected to be able to buy. (There is a lot more I could say about exactly why, but I will save that for another time.) The first of these was bought for a miserly sum (from Jarndyce!), the second … was the most expensive Haywood item I have bought in seven years.

I also found a lovely copy of the 1788 Harrison edition of The Invisible Spy—a book that I thought (for many years) would actually be very easy to find, but over time have I came to realise that it is extremely uncommon. Indeed, I had reached the point where I had begun to suspect that I would never find a copy of this volume. I was also pleased to find a second copy of a New Present for a Servant Maid. It was very defective (and, so, modestly priced, but it contains the all-important frontispiece that my first copy lacked. I love the image and so I was a very happy to find this indeed.

In what is still, sadly, an extremely uncommon occurrence, I was cold-contacted and offered a copy of a Haywood item—Sir Robert Walpole Vindicated, a pamphlet published by Haywood “at Fame in the Piazza Covent Garden.” This is only the second work I have that was published by Haywood. It would be nice to have more, since this is a period of her life that interests me the most, but many of these works survive in extremely small numbers.

I also picked up another issue of The Wife, Bowdlerised in Boston in 1806 (not a very nice copy, but only three others are known), odd volumes of Epistles for Ladies (1776), and the Dramatic Historiographer (1756) and a number of works of Haywoodiana: Richard Savage’s Miscellaneous poems and translations by several hands (1726), which contains a poem in praise of Haywood’s writing by Savage, Henry Fielding’s The Author’s Farce (1730), which contains a caricature of Haywood (as Mrs Novel), and The Historical Register, for the year 1736 … To which is added Eurydice hiss’d (1737), both of which include Haywood in the cast. Given the dearth of biographical information about Haywood, I particularly like these works that evidence her life outside of her works. There are not many of these and so it was nice to find three of them so close together.

Returning to the works that numerically dominated my collecting: concerning The Female Spectator, I have previously mentioned (here) three of the sets, which I bought from the same dealer, at great expense and with some misgivings, and which raised my total of the 1748 “Second” London edition up to seven. To these, I added a few sets of the 1775 Glasgow edition—one of them, a gorgeous set, was bought on my behalf by James Cummins at a New York auction. This was the first time I had a dealer buy at an auction for me; the process went very smoothly, and the commission and cost of postage was a lot less than I was expecting (for why, see below). However, getting the set to Melbourne turned out to be a bit of a saga. The books were held up in customs and it was almost two months of filling in ridiculous forms before I got them home.

The remaining set of The Female Spectator was of the first French translation—a stunning set of an edition not recorded in my Bibliography, but which I now refer to as Ab.60.10A (the imprints of which are dated 1750, 1750, 1750, 1751 instead of Ab.60.11’s 1749, 1750, 1750, 1751). I would like more of these early editions of <>La Spectatrice, for the same reason that I would like more copies of the first edition of The Female Spectator—just about every set I have examined closely is, in fact, different from every other set! A bibliographer heaven.

Among the sets of La Belle Assemblée that I picked was up a Dublin “Fourth” edition of 1740, whcih David located at a regional Irish auction—thanks David! The set is comprised of three separate printings, all of which are very rare. This was my first experience buying at a conventional auction-house from the other side of the world. The bidding went smoothly enough, but the cost of postage was mind-boggling: almost three hundred dollars! I did a lot better, less than a year later, by having an established dealer (James Cummins) buy on my behalf at an auction, and then package and post the item to me.

The most interesting of the Belle Assemblée sets was a volume containing first editions of the three parts of the first volume. All issues of these parts are very rare, and one of the Parts in this set was previously unknown to me (a “Third Edition” of Part 2). Like the first, octavo, editions of The Female Spectator, and the first French edition of the same work, every copy of the octavo Parts of La Belle Assemblée are always full of (bibliographical) surprises.

The remaining three sets of La Belle Assemblée are of no particular interest bibliographically, but they contain interesting provenance information—or rather, interesting to me. One day I hope to do a wide survey of the provenance of surviving copies of Haywood works, so I feel compelled to collect what I can. Unfortunately, from a collector’s point of view, “interesting provenance information” justifies the purchase of a great many duplicates, in very poor condition; so the less I say about these for now, the better!

The last the items I will mention today are editions of this work. As I said in 2010 “almost all editions are uncommon”—and remain so. Two of the three copies I bought in the last three years (Ed.59.16b2 from 1878 and Ed.59.18 from ca. 1880) were previously unknown to me, and the third (Ed.59.15b from 1822) was known in only a single copy. A monstrously-expensive copy of an issue I have not seen elsewhere has been available in Japan since at least August 2015 for 150K Yen (i.e., about two thousand dollars). I can’t bring myself to pay this sum, but it does reinforce the point about rarity: of the ten nineteenth-century editions and issues that I know of, two are known in only two copies, seven appear to be unique (including this Japanese one) and one has been lost!

Of course, I am probably the only person who is interested in these reprints of a translation of a translation, which is why—with the exception of the Japanese copy—they tend to sell quite cheaply, even from dealers such as Jarndyce. And, since I only have five of the ten editions and issues, let me finish by saying: Long may this obscurity reign!

It is probably just as well that I haven’t been exposed to any greater temptations than I have in the last two years, but it is hard not to be disappointed with the quality and quantity of Haywood material that has reached the market. As an eminent, and very experienced dealer, said to me recently: the well of Haywood material is running dry. He continued, “I'm not seeing real collections of early literature turning up anymore, here [in the US] or in England. I guess it’s just as well I'm getting old, but it would be more fun to go out with a bang instead of a whimper.” Hear, hear!

Thursday, 20 December 2018

The trade-cards, trade tokens or bookplates below, are from a collection of English engraved advertisements compiled around 1758 by F. Legge of St. James’s Market preserved at Yale’s Walpole Library.

The Legge collection has been given the title “Trade tokens and bookplates, 1705–1799 (bulk 1757–1758)” and a scan of the entire volume has been published online (here). The images have been colour-corrected and reduced to 500 pixels wide.

The fourteen trade-cards below are of for “Darres,” John Kendray, John Leake, Henry Lewis, James Noyes, Samuel Paterson, S. Pitt, John Pridden, William Separd, G. Vander Gucht, John Ward, John Wilke, Robert Withy, and Ryall Withy (again, none of which are in the Franks Bequest Catalogue).

For my previous posts on bookseller trade cards of the eighteenth century, see here and here.

The myth of a vast Vatican collection of erotica or pornography was established sixty years ago, by Ralph Ginzburg.

In his Unhurried View of Erotica (1958), after one hundred pages of broad-brush history, Ginzburg turns to the question of “the whereabouts of the world’s … great collections of erotica”—public and private—which he ranks, according to the size of the collection.

At the top of Ginzburg’s list is the Vatican library, with “25,000 volumes and some 100,000 prints” of erotica, a collection of “hush-hush volumes” significantly larger than that in the Private Case of the British Museum Library (which he estimates to be 20,000 volumes—it is actually more like 2000), and the Enfer of the Bibliothèque Nationale (2,500 volumes).

It is unclear how Ginzburg arrived at this crazy estimate, but most of his figures are inflated. Rather than “25,000 volumes,” the Vatican actually held only fifty-one items in 1936. This figure is the exact number of items recorded by Alfred Rose, compiler of the Registrum Librorum Eroticorum (1936), during his personal investigation of the Vatican’s collection in August 1934.

To put this pip-squeak collection into context, Rose lists over five thousand titles in the Register of Erotic Books. None of the items in the Vatican collection are particularly important—and almost all of them are in Latin, held in a collection of books on the culture of classical antiquity. The only book in English is Hodder Westropp and C. Wake’s Ancient Symbol Worship. Influence of the Phallic idea in the Religions of Antiquity, 2nd ed. (1875). Not exactly a classic of erotic literature.

No writer before Ginzburg appears to have claimed that the Vatican has such a large collection of erotic books, and so I it seems likely that Ginzburg is, in fact, responsible for the myth that the world’s “foremost collection of erotica is in The Vatican Library.”

Prior to Ginzburg, the only scholar to discuss the Vatican collection, commented that the “Enfer” at the Bibliothèque Nationale may have been modelled on a “similar institution [at] the Vatican Library” (Alec Craig, Above all Liberties (1942), 145). The comparison is a little misleading since the Vatican’s collection is limited to blasphemous or heterodox works, whereas those in the Bibliothèque Nationale’s “Enfer” are often indecent, obscene, or pornographic.

After Ginzburg, however, the absurd conspiracy theory, that the Vatican has a “vast,” “comprehensive,” or even “complete” collection of pornography has been endlessly repeated—and endlessly debunked. There are many examples of the ignorant repetition of this myth, which indicate the continuing influence of Ginzburg.

In the 1990s, Julie Peakman revealed the basic misunderstanding that supports Ginzburg’s claim, by conflating the Index Librorum Prohibitorum—the bibliography (published by the Vatican) of books that Catholics were prohibited from owning or reading—with the collection that the Vatican itself held.

(This is like assuming that, just because I compile a bibliography of every work by Eliza Haywood, that I own copies of all of these works. If only that were true! Excuse me while I make a list of the world’s largest diamonds!)

Anyway, Peakman states: “The Vatican’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum, allegedly with the largest collection of books (around 25,000 volumes and 100,000 prints) is ‘forbidden’ to Catholics, and not open to the general public” (Peakman, Mighty Lewd Books (2003), 195).

In the early 2000s, David Isaacson elaborated on this misunderstanding when he cautioned that “only libraries with a special purpose like the Vatican Library’s famous collection of prohibited books, or the Kinsey Institute for Sex Research Library at Indiana University, have the need for comprehensive collections of pornography” (Isaacson, in Selecting Materials for Library Collections (2004), 6).”

My favourite example of this mad conspiracy theory comes from a “Distinguished Professor of Latin American and Latino Culture” at Amherst College—seemingly, one of the top Liberal Arts colleges in America—in a 2005 essay on censorship. In a lovely example of alliterative, hyperbolic over-reach, of grandiloquent ignorance, Prof. Ilan Stavans, refers (here), without irony, to the Vatican’s “very vast holdings on erotica, blasphemy, and freemasonry, among other risqué topics.” Nice.

As I pointed out in my Foxcroft lecture, recently published (and from which the above is an excerpt of sorts), the edition of Westropp and Wake’s Ancient Symbol Worship—held by the Vatican—is also held by the State Library of Victoria. There are also three copies of the first edition of this book in libraries throughout Australia, and there are over twenty more copies available on ABE.

What this means is that, for as little as USD14.50, you can have a Private Case collection that equals the Vatican’s “very vast holdings on erotica” in English.

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Readers will find a link to a YouTube video of my 2016 Foxcroft lecture here. To buy a copy of the (short) book that I based on this lecture, published by the Ancora Press in 2018 in an edition of one hundred copies, contact Kay Craddock - Antiquarian Bookseller.

Saturday, 15 December 2018

Sir Ambrose Heal's "Bookseller and Stationers' trade-cards of the eighteenth century" appeared in The Penrose Annual, vol. 45 (1951), 29–32. It contains one page of introductory text (which says nothing about the production, publication, distribution and history of bookplates and trade cards or anything of note concerning bookselling and printing in the eighteenth century), four pages of illustrations (showing sixteen separate trade cards, below) and three pages of notes on the booksellers.

About four years ago, shortly after publishing my post on Bookplates of Booksellers and Circulating Libraries, I checked out Heal's essay in the hope that it would provide either more information on (no), or more images of (yes), the 164 bookplates and trade-cards listed in the Franks Bequest Catalogue—of which I was only able to provide two in my original post.

I am not sure why it has taken four years to post these scans, perhaps I was hoping to find more images in his other works. If so, it would appear that I was unsuccessful. However, I have fond a few more images on line, which I will post shortly.

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The sixteen trade-cards below are of for James Adams, John Bromley, James Brooke, James Buckland, Thomas Edlin, William Kerby, Lackington, Allen & Co., Arthur Lyon, Ralph Minors, Francis Noble, Bartholomew Penny, Daniel Richards, William Sanby, J. Shove, Samuel Stillingfleet, and Thomas Worrall (none of which are in the Franks Bequest Catalogue).